EMP Prepper Homestead

Prologue

The generator kicked on at 4:12 in the morning, and Joe Henfry was awake before the second cycle of the compressor.

He lay still for a moment in the dark, listening.

That was the habit now. Listen first. Move second.

The house made its usual sounds. Beams settling. Wind combing through the pines on the ridge above them. Somewhere below the loft, the tick of the woodstove cooling down from the night before.

Imogen shifted beside him, one arm thrown across her eyes.

"It's the well pump," she murmured, not really awake. "It cycles at four."

"I know."

"Then why are you awake."

"Because it cycles at four."

She made a small noise that might have been a laugh and might have been a complaint, and she rolled toward the wall and was gone again.

Joe stayed where he was for another sixty seconds. Then he got up.

The floor was cold. October in the Wasatch was already thinking hard about winter, and the cabin held onto the night air like a grudge.

He pulled on jeans and a flannel and went down the stairs in his socks, skipping the fourth step because it groaned.

Mack lifted his head from the rug by the door.

The German shepherd was four years old and eighty five pounds of black and tan opinion, and he had decided sometime in the last year that Joe belonged to him personally.

"Stay," Joe said quietly.

Mack stayed. His ears tracked Joe across the room anyway.

The kitchen window faced east toward the notch in the ridge where the sun would come up in two hours. Right now there was nothing out there but a bruised gray line above black timber.

Joe filled the kettle from the tap and set it on the propane burner.

He did not turn on the overhead light.

That was habit too. Nine months in the mountains had taught him that his eyes worked better in the dark if he stopped insisting they didn't have to.

He stood with his hands on the counter and let the kettle warm.

Twenty six months ago he had been sitting in traffic on the 405 with the air conditioning on full and his phone reading him quarterly numbers, and a helicopter had been circling something ugly in Inglewood, and he had thought, with a clarity that frightened him,

that he was watching the last years of something.

Not the end of the world. Nothing so dramatic.

Just the last years of a thing holding together.

He had not been able to unthink it after that.

Imogen had fought him for eleven months. She had a practice she loved, a pediatric nursing gig at a clinic in Culver City, and friends she had known since her twenties, and a house with lemon trees in the yard.

He had not argued with her. He had just kept bringing her articles.

Grid transformer lead times. Eighteen months, minimum, for a unit the size of a delivery truck, and most of them built overseas. Six hundred of them in the country doing the load of a nation. Zero strategic reserve worth the name.

Solar activity reports. The Carrington Event of 1859 and the telegraph operators whose keys threw sparks onto their desks.

The 1989 Quebec blackout, nine million people dark in ninety seconds from a sun that had simply decided to breathe out in the wrong direction.

Then the unclassified congressional testimony. The words he still saw sometimes when he closed his eyes.

Imogen had read that one twice.

Then she had put the papers down on the kitchen island, in the house with the lemon trees, and she had said, "If we go, we go all the way. I'm not doing a hobby."

"It's not a hobby."

"Then prove it."

He had proved it.

They had sold the house at the top of the market, and it had hurt, and it had also bought them forty acres on a bench above a creek in a valley the maps barely bothered with.

The cabin was already there. Built in 1974 by a man who had clearly expected trouble of his own, which was how Joe got the root cellar for free.

Everything since had been work.

The kettle started to tick.

Joe poured the water over the grounds and stood in the dark with the cup warming his hands and did the walk in his head.

He did it most mornings. It was not anxiety. It was inventory.

Root cellar. Four hundred and eighty pounds of hard red wheat in food grade buckets with oxygen absorbers. Rice, beans, oats, salt, sugar, honey that would outlive all of them.

Freeze dried in the back, rotated, dated. Two hundred and eleven cans of home pressure canned elk and venison from last season, because he had learned to hunt at forty one and had been bad at it for exactly one year.

The spring house up the slope, gravity fed, running year round at three gallons a minute even in February.

The sand filter. The backup filter. The backup to the backup, which was a stack of ceramic elements in a crate and a very old set of instructions.

Two cords of split lodgepole under the eave, another six in the round waiting on him.

Diesel in the buried tank, treated and tested. Propane in the thousand gallon pig behind the shed, filled in August.

The solar array on the south roof, and behind it, in a plywood box lined with heavy gauge screen and grounded to a copper rod he had driven himself, the spares.

Two charge controllers. An inverter. Three radios. A thermometer. A multimeter. A box of LED bulbs and a spare well pump control board still in its static bag.

The box had cost him nine hundred dollars and four weekends and Imogen's complete and genuine bafflement.

"It's a Faraday cage," he had told her.

"It's a plywood box."

"It's a plywood box that doesn't let electromagnetic energy inside."

She had looked at it. Then she had looked at him.

"Joe," she had said. "If the thing you're scared of happens, that box is going to be the most valuable object in the county."

"Yes."

"And if it doesn't happen, it's a plywood box."

"Yes."

She had nodded slowly.

"Okay," she had said. "That's fair."

That was the day he had stopped worrying about whether she was with him.

Joe finished the coffee and rinsed the cup and set it upside down on the rack.

Outside, the gray line above the ridge had gotten one shade less black.

He went out onto the porch in his socks anyway, because the boards were dry, and he stood with his arms crossed and looked at the sky.

There were more stars than a man raised in Los Angeles knew what to do with.

And there was something else.

Up north, above the shoulder of the mountain, a faint green wash moved across the dark.

It rippled. It thinned. It came back stronger, and for a few seconds it was not faint at all.

Joe stood very still.

Aurora. At this latitude.

He had seen it once before, in March, a pale smear that Hazel had insisted was a cloud. This was not that.

This was curtains.

He watched it for a long time. Long enough that his feet went numb through his socks and the coffee went cold in his stomach.

Then he went inside and sat down at the desk in the corner of the main room and turned on the shortwave.

Static, mostly. Bands wandering all over the place. A Spanish language station that faded in and out like someone breathing.

He worked the dial patiently until he found a weather net out of Colorado, and he listened to a tired man read numbers into the night.

Geomagnetic storm conditions. Planetary K index elevated. A watch upgraded to a warning.

An X class flare, the man said, at 0219 Universal. Earth directed. Coronal mass ejection confirmed.

Estimated arrival window, he said, and then he gave a range that started in about nineteen hours.

Joe wrote it on the pad beside the radio. He wrote it twice.

Then he sat back and put his hands flat on the desk and did not move for a while.

There was a second thing the tired man said, near the end, and Joe almost missed it because of a burst of interference.

Something about the flare being the third in a series. Something about the first two having cleared the path.

Joe knew what that meant. He had read about it obsessively enough to be embarrassed by himself.

A CME moving through a corridor already swept clean by earlier ejections did not slow down the way it should.

It arrived early. It arrived fast. It arrived carrying a magnetic field oriented in whatever direction it happened to be oriented, and if that direction was south, it coupled with the planet like a key going into a lock.

Nineteen hours was the polite estimate.

Joe looked at the clock on the wall.

Then he got up and went to wake his wife.

Imogen took it well, which he had come to expect and had never stopped being grateful for.

She sat on the edge of the bed with the quilt around her shoulders and her hair flattened on one side and listened to the whole thing without interrupting once.

Then she said, "What do you need from me."

"Fill everything," he said. "Every container. Bathtubs, the drums in the mudroom, the barrels in the shed. If the pump goes down we're on gravity from the spring house, but I want a buffer while I confirm the line."

"Freezer?"

"I'm going to run it hard all day, then we start eating out of it tonight and canning tomorrow."

"The kids."

Joe paused.

"Tell them the truth," Imogen said. It was not a question.

"Some of it."

"Joe."

"Hazel gets all of it," he said. "Zachary gets enough."

Imogen thought about that.

"Zachary's nine," she said. "He isn't stupid. He'll know we're lying by lunch."

"Then we don't lie. We just don't hand him the whole thing at once."

She nodded and stood up and went to find her jeans, and that was the end of the discussion, because that was how they worked now.

Hazel came downstairs at six thirty with her blonde hair in a sleep tangle and her eyes already narrow.

She was eleven and she had her mother's talent for reading a room in under three seconds.

"Why is Dad filling the bathtub," she said.

"Because I asked him to," Imogen said.

"Why."

Joe came around the corner with a five gallon jug in each hand.

"Because the sun did something last night," he said. "And it's pointed at us. And there's a decent chance the power goes out for a while."

Hazel absorbed this.

"How long is a while."

"That's the part I don't know."

She looked at the jugs. She looked at her father's face.

"Okay," she said. "What do you want me to do."